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Gogol

adapted by Jason Craig and Sean Owens
SF Weekly review June 20, 2001 (Michael Scott Moore)

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Gogol
The stories of the Russian master are woven
into an odd clown show

Like the movie Kafka, Gogol is not
a biography of the writer in question
so much as a mélange of his stories.
Jason Craig and Sean Owens have
mixed "The Overcoat," "The Nose,"
and "Diary of a Madman" in a
blender and come up with a very
strange clown show, with songs.
Not everyone can do clown work,
but luckily the cast includes Chris
Kuckenbaker, who plays the
pathetic, overcoat-obsessed civil
servant, Akaky. He can do clown work, and his scenes -- posing
in front of a mirror with a new coat, imagining himself rich and
proud, or making tea by sticking a tea bag in his mouth and
drinking from a kettle -- leave the clearest, most Gogol-esque
impressions. The "Nose" segments involve a big, warty clown
nose that gets clipped off by a barber and rediscovered in a loaf
of bread; they interweave with Owens' oddly pretty songs as
Aksenty, the madman. But a lot of the scenes play in a
vaudevillian netherworld somewhere outside the stories, where
clowns pop balloons in each other's faces and cruise around on
roller skates. The wackiness is hard to sustain, even for 90
minutes, and David Malloy's excellent Russian-tinted score is not
enough to save it.

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